I am Technology Director at Scott Logic and am a prolific technical author, blogger and speaker on a range of technologies.

My blog includes posts on a wide range of topics, including HTML5 / JavaScript and data visualisation with D3 and d3fc. You'll also find a whole host of posts about previous technology interests including iOS, Swift, WPF and Silverlight.

13th
Dec
·
12 min read

Over the past couple of months I’ve been exploring the potential of WebAssembly. I wanted to try my hand at creating a more complex WebAssembly application, which is why I’ve been spending my evenings working on a CHIP-8 emulator ... and learning Rust!

22nd
Nov
·
9 min read

A few weeks ago the new Bristol Pound mobile app was launched, allowing users of this local currency to find vendors, view transactions and make payments on both iOS and Android. This post describes our experience of writing this application using React Native.

30th
Oct
·
12 min read

In this blog post I'll take a look at a real-world application of WebAssembly (WASM), the re-implementation of D3 force layout. The end result is a drop-in replacement for the D3 APIs, compiled to WASM using AssemblyScript (TypeScript).

14th
Sep
·
11 min read

Creating asynchronous functions that are recursive can be a bit of a challenge. This blog post takes a look at various different approaches, including callbacks and promises, and ultimately demonstrates how async functions result in a much simpler and cleaner solution.

16th
Jul
·
2 min read

A few months ago we contributed a project, ContainerJS, to the Symphony Software Foundation, an organization that fosters open source and collaboration within financial services. The Foundation has various legal requirements that must be adhered to, including that all contributors (i.e. committers) sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Unfortunately as...

25th
Jun
·
8 min read

Place names in UK and Ireland are very much influenced by their surroundings, with endings such as -hill, -ford, and -wood quite clearly referencing local geography. This blog post uses the new NDJSON command line tools for processing, transforming and joining datasets to create an optimised visualisation.

22nd
May
·
8 min read

This post takes a look at the recently launched GitHub App platform, that allows developers to create integrations and services which can be shared with others. The post describes the development of gifbot, a simple and fun App!

5th
Apr
·
10 min read

Small multiples repeat the same basic chart, typically with the same axes, to display different slices of a dataset. They are an excellent way of showing rich multi-dimensional data, without becoming a dense mess of lines. This post looks at how to implement small multiples with D3 and d3fc.

28th
Feb
·
4 min read

I downloaded an analysed the training data for 1,000 athlete who ran the London Marathon in 2016. From this data I've learnt that people put in ~30% less mileage than popular plans suggest, Sunday mornings are a firm favourite for long runs, and that Saturday morning parkruns are very popular!

26th
Jan
·
4 min read

I recently downloaded run data for the 7,190 athletes who recorded their London Marathon on Strava, a popular platform for runners and cyclists. This blog post visualises and analyses the data in various interesting ways.

15th
Dec 2016
·
5 min read

A few days ago the roadmap for future Angular releases, starting with v.4 in March 2017, was unveiled. It once again made me re-visit my personal doubts about semantic versioning, the underlying issue being that it is great for computers, but bad for humans. Considering that people are the primary...

30th
Nov 2016
·
1 min read

For the past four years I’ve been an author on Ray Wenderlich’s website which provides tutorials for iOS developers. I don’t do much native iOS development these days, However, I do like to keep my skills up to date. As part of this team I sometimes find myself being assigned...

22nd
Jun 2016
·
9 min read

I’ve recently been playing around with the JavaScript Abstract Syntax Trees (AST), with the aim of transforming some JavaScript code into various other languages (Java, C#, Objective-C). As part of my research, I looked at how Babel performs AST transforms. If you’re not familiar with Babel, and the plugins which...

10th
Jun 2016
·
12 min read

19th
May 2016
·
9 min read

The redux pattern provides a simple (and strict) pattern for managing state; a single store holds the state while a reducer applies actions, evolving the application state. As your app becomes more complex, you can split up your reducer into separate functions, however, what if you have multiple instances of...

28th
Mar 2016
·
8 min read

Mondo Bank has recently moved into public Beta, sending out 1,000 cards to trial customers each week. I received my Beta card a few days ago, and have been using it ever since. This blog post takes a quick look at the Mondo API and how I used it to automate expense claims!

22nd
Feb 2016
·
1 min read

Swift Bond is a binding framework that removes the mundane task of wiring up your UI. In this tutorial, which was originally published on Ray Wenderlich's website, I introduce the concepts of Bond and demonstrate how to use it to rapidly build an iOS app.

25th
Jan 2016
·
12 min read

This post looks at integrating Angular 2 with Immutable.js and Redux, a popular Flux store implementation. It also demonstrates that the functional approach, encouraged by these technologies, allow for powerful concepts such as time travel, where you can replay actions and application state.

5th
Jan 2016
·
8 min read

Angular 2.0 introduces a component-based approach to building applications, where the rendering can be optimised by selecting a suitable change detection strategy for each component. This post looks at how the OnPush change detection strategy works quite elegantly with the concept of immutable objects as enforced by Immutable.js.

24th
Dec 2015
·
14 min read

From my perspective Angular 2 is a great improvement over Angular 1. The framework is simpler, and as a result your code is more concise, making use of modern JavaScript concepts. However, this does come at a cost; with Angular 2 the required tooling is really quite complicated.

7th
Dec 2015
·
17 min read

This blog post takes a step-by-step approach to building a simple todo-list application with Angular 2.0. Along the way we'll look at web components, dependency injection, TypeScript, bindings and the Angular 2.0 change detection strategy which combine to make a much more elegant framework to its predecessor.

18th
Nov 2015
·
9 min read

A few days ago Bloomberg published their list of 50 companies to watch in 2016, and for some reason they decided to publish the entire report in ASCII! I thought it would be a bit of fun to see if I could use D3 to create my own ASCI charts

5th
Oct 2015
·
6 min read

JavaScript builds are getting more complex and time consuming. This blog post shares a few steps I took to improve the performance of one of our project's grunt build, hopefully some of the tools I used will be of use to others.

22nd
Jul 2015
·
10 min read

Most charting libraries are monoliths. The more features they support, the more unwieldy their APIs tend to become. With the d3fc project we have been exploring an alternative approach, constructing charts from a set of small components, using the D3 library.

8th
Jul 2015
·
9 min read

Most charting libraries are monoliths. The more features they support, the more unwieldy their APIs tend to become. With the d3fc project we have been exploring an alternative approach, constructing charts from a set of small components, using the D3 library.

28th
Apr 2015
·
8 min read

My previous blog post took a first look at ReactiveCocoa 3.0 (RC3), where I described the new Signal interface, and the pipe forward operator. In this blog post I continue my exploration of the RC3 APIs and turn my attention to signal producers. I also discuss a few points around the overall clarity of the new ReactiveCocoa APIs.

24th
Apr 2015
·
7 min read

26th
Mar 2015
·
1 min read

A few months ago Facebook announced React Native, a framework that lets you build native iOS applications with JavaScript. I've been spending the past couple of months building am app with this framework, which I have finally been able to share!

26th
Mar 2015
·
7 min read

I've been building a React Native app for the past few months, which was published as a tutorial yesterday. A number of people have asked about my thoughts and opinions about React Native - which I am sharing in this blog post.

11th
Feb 2015
·
8 min read

Swift has access to all of the Objective-C APIs, which means that anything you could do with Objective-C you can now do with Swift. However, there are times when it is worth exploring a better, pure-Swift, alternative. This post explores the pros and cons of KVO versus a couple of Swift alternatives.

2nd
Feb 2015
·
9 min read

This blog looks at how CSS flexbox layout can be applied to SVG in order to simplify the task of constructing charts with D3. This approach has been made possible by the JavaScript flexbox implementation that Facebook recently open sourced to support ReactJS Native.

27th
Jan 2015
·
8 min read

Swift doesn’t support throwing exceptions, nor does it support catching them. This wouldn’t be a problem if you could develop iOS apps in pure Swift, but unfortunately at the moment you cannot. When developing an app most of the APIs you’ll be working with are Objective-C APIs that have been...

8th
Dec 2014
·
7 min read

20th
Nov 2014
·
6 min read

Swift's strict initialisation process results in a number of practical issues, leaving developers scratching their heads. This post explores a few solutions including two-phase initialisation, the use of optionals and lazy properties.

29th
Oct 2014
·
12 min read

14th
Oct 2014
·
4 min read

Recently I updated the Scott Logic blog to implement infinite scrolling using a combination of Jekyll pagination and jScroll. Both of these components are quite fussy about their respective configuration, meaning that integrating them took longer than expected. I thought I'd share my solution in this blog post, hopefully saving others from the hours I spent digging into jScroll code or cursing Jekyll!

24th
Sep 2014
·
2 min read

Swift, as I am sure you are aware, is quite a strict, safe and strongly-typed language. However, because the language needs to maintain Objective-C compatibility it has some rather curious features, and the behaviour of `AnyObject` is one of them!

22nd
Sep 2014
·
12 min read

This post is a continuation of my previous which looked at implementing Conway’s Game of Life using functional techniques. Here I look at how memoization can be used to cache the return value of a function in order to improve performance.

18th
Sep 2014
·
1 min read

Apple released the first public beta of the Swift programming language just over three months ago. Within days of the release myself and Matt Galloway started working on our book Swift by Tutorials, which as of yesterday is finally finished and shipping!

10th
Sep 2014
·
13 min read

This blog post shows an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using functional techniques in Swift. This results in code which is a clear and concise representation of the game’s logic. I also take a closer look at ranges, intervals, the pattern match operator, ~= and how local functions help...

24th
Jul 2014
·
6 min read

10th
Jul 2014
·
1 min read

A few months ago I published a blog post which showed the results of analysing the meta-data of 75,000 apps from the iTunes App Store. This blog post continues the analysis by adding 60,000 Android apps into the mix.

26th
Jun 2014
·
8 min read

In this blog post I want to take a quick look at the Swift Sequence protocol, which forms the basis for the for-in loop, and see how this allows you to write code that performs sequence operations that are only evaluated on-demand.

19th
May 2014
·
1 min read

Moving from desktop or plugin technologies (Flex, Silverlight, Java Applets) to HTML5 is a challenge for developers of large-scale enterprise applications. This White Paper discusses the challenges and offers potential solutions.

20th
Mar 2014
·
9 min read

The App Store continues its rapid growth, with approximately 300,000 apps added each year. I decided it would be fun to download as much app metadata as possible in order to see what patterns and trends I could find. This blog post describes the results.

19th
Mar 2014
·
8 min read

This blog post looks at how to simulate accelerometer and location data so that you can test iOS apps without the need for a physical device. The simulated data is provided by an interactive UI which allows you to rotate the phone and mark paths on a map which can then be replayed.

13th
Mar 2014
·
2 min read

It feels like everyone in the iOS community is talking about ReactiveCocoa at the moment. In this blog post I talk briefly about what ReactiveCocoa is and the 'Definitive Guide' which I wrote for raywenderlich.com

26th
Sep 2013
·
10 min read

This blog post looks at creating an interactive tab bar controller transition, where you can swipe left and right to navigate between the tabs. The transition itself is a 'paperfold' effect - very pretty!

20th
Sep 2013
·
9 min read

With iOS 7 Apple introduced a new set of APIs for creating custom View Controller transitions. In this blog post I look at how to create a custom 'flip' transition, giving the impression of a turning page.

9th
Aug 2013
·
5 min read

A couple of days ago Microsoft announced Windows Phone App Studio, a web based tool for the rapid creation of Windows Phone applications. In this blog post I take this new technology for a spin to see what it's capable of, and the interesting potential it has for creating 'personal' apps.

3rd
Jun 2013
·
1 min read

My latest iOS development article has been published on Ray Wenderlich's site, this time I look into how to develop custom iOS controls. The article describes the creation of a 'range' slider control, and covers topics such as API design and using Core Graphics for rendering. Interestingly, iOS developers have...

22nd
May 2013
·
1 min read

For the last six months or so I have been deeply immersed in a combination of iOS and HTML5 development. Now I don't want my C#/XAML skills to get too rusty, so over the weekend I decided to write a simple Windows 8 Store App. You can see the results...

15th
Apr 2013
·
6 min read

This blog post describes the addition of a two-finger rotation and three-finger pitch gesture to the Windows Phone 8 Map control. You can see these gesture in action below: The WP8 release replaced the image-tile based Bing maps with a fully vector-rendered map from Nokia. Being vector-based, this map can...

8th
Apr 2013
·
9 min read

This blog post compares the same twitter search application written with both Knockout and Kendo in order to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each framework. Introduction I've always been a big fan of Knockout, most likely because it reminds me of Silverlight (rest in peace). For my thoughts on...

28th
Mar 2013
·
1 min read

Announcing a one-day conference at the Royal Society, London UK, on the 14th of May. Just a few years back I wrote a white paper titled "Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide ..." with the help of a couple of my colleagues, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the...

25th
Feb 2013
·
1 min read

I've just received an email from those nice folks at CodeProject letting me know that my article 'A Windows Phone 8 Run Tracking App in 100 Lines of Code' has just won the Best Mobile article of January 2013 award.

15th
Feb 2013
·
11 min read

In the past few months I have been immersing myself into the world of iOS development. Whilst the Objective-C language takes a little getting used to, with its odd syntax and memory management rules, it is certainly a fun platform to develop for. I do miss a few C# language...

7th
Jan 2013
·
1 min read

Earlier today I received an email informing me that I have been awarded a CodeProject MVP for the year 2013. I am very grateful to CodeProject for this award - it is a very popular website for developers, with around 10 million members, and thousands of authors. It is an...

4th
Jan 2013
·
1 min read

Yesterday I published a new article on CodePrioject: Property Finder - a Cross-Platform Xamarin MonoTouch Mobile App This article looks at how you can write a cross-platform mobile application with a shared C# code base using Xamarin MonoTouch. The application that is described in the article, a property finder, is...

12th
Nov 2012
·
1 min read

The technologies that we use to write applications for our end users are changing at a frightening pace! Over the past few years the title of my blog has changed from "Adventures in WPF" to "Adventures in .NET", and more recently to the very generic "Adventures in Technology". The latest...

23rd
Oct 2012
·
8 min read

This blog post looks at the issues regarding integration of KnockoutJS and jQueryMobile, and provides a simple worked example - a Twitter Search application - where the two technologies play nicely together! The code for this blog post can be found on github. You can also try it out on...

12th
Oct 2012
·
1 min read

A couple of days ago a published a new article on CodeProject, this latest article tackles the migration of a gesture-drive application from Windows Phone to Windows 8: "I had fun porting my gesture-driven to-do list application to Windows 8, and had an interesting journey along the way. There are...

29th
Aug 2012
·
1 min read

I have just found out that my article "A Gesture-Driven Windows Phone To-Do List" won first place in the July 2012 best mobile article category. Thanks CodeProject, looking forward to receiving my collection of goodies - especially the new mouse mat! (Why not check out my latest article, a HTML5-based...

23rd
Aug 2012
·
1 min read

A while back, when PhoneGap for Windows Phone was still in beta, I created Property Finder, an application for searching UK property listings. This application successfully made its way into the Windows Phone Marketplace, making it the first WP7 PhoneGap app. I recently developed the Property Finder application further in...

30th
Jul 2012
·
5 min read

A couple of weeks ago Josh Smith published his latest book, "iOS Programming for .NET Developers", which seeks to ease the transition from .NET to iOS developers. As someone who has many years of .NET experience, and more recently a desire to develop for 'the other side', I thought this...

26th
Jul 2012
·
1 min read

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a Windows Phone to-do list application, inspired by the iPhone Clear app. I have just published the final application over on codeproject. You can see it in action below: Pop over to CodeProject for the full sourcecode and implementation details....

24th
Jul 2012
·
14 min read

This blog post describes the creation of a simple twitter search application for iOS, based on a similar application I wrote for Windows Phone a few months back. In this blog post I'll used the MonoTouch platform, which allows you to write iOS applications using C#. This blog posts describes...

5th
Jul 2012
·
4 min read

It's been a busy Twitter day for me. A reasonably inane tweet that I posted this morning pointing out that the announcement of the (potential) Higgs Boson discovery was written using the much derided Comic Sans font has been retweeted thousands of times, and has been the top tweet for...

27th
Jun 2012
·
10 min read

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a todo list application which uses gestures to achieve its basic functions, a left swipe deletes an item, while a right-swipe marks it as complete. In this blog post I am adding re-ordering which is initiated via a tap-and-hold gesture and performed...

22nd
Jun 2012
·
1 min read

My blog post from yesterday "A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8" sparked a bit of furious debate on Twitter. I think it is fair to say that I was not the only one who was quite concerned about the impact of aligning the developer experience of Windows Phone 8...

21st
Jun 2012
·
3 min read

This blog post takes a look at what Windows Phone 8 (WP8) means for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) developers and the Microsoft development platform in general. This has been a big week for Microsoft; Monday saw them unveil the new Surface tablet that runs Windows 8. This was followed up...

20th
Jun 2012
·
2 min read

6th
Jun 2012
·
13 min read

This blog post describes the implementation of a gesture-based todo-list application. The simple interface is controlled entirely by drag, flick and swipe: So far the application supports deletion and completion of tasks, but not the addition of new ones. I'll get to this in a later blog post! Introduction -...

24th
Apr 2012
·
4 min read

This blog post presents a thorough analysis of the performance of various WPF Charting components. The results show that a new class of charting solutions, which use raster-based graphics as opposed to retained mode vector graphics, provide a considerable performance advantage

20th
Apr 2012
·
8 min read

Introduction This is the second post in my series about databinding in Silverlight and WPF. In the first post I looked at how you wire-up UI controls to a model in the absence of a databinding framework. I showed how databindings can be created in code-behind, removing the need for...

12th
Apr 2012
·
1 min read

I have just published a new article over on CodeProject called "KnockoutJS vs. Silverlight". It demonstrates the implementation of the same application using both frameworks, and seeks to answer the question "Which is better, Silverlight or Knockout?" It's a bit of an epic (6,500 words). I hope people find it...

5th
Apr 2012
·
10 min read

OK, so the title is a little ambitious, but there is nothing wrong with setting yourself lofty aims! Because of the depth of this topic I have decided to split this tutorial up into a series of blog posts, each of which explore a different aspect of the binding framework....

12th
Mar 2012
·
9 min read

This blog post describes my experiences of developing a simple Todo application with Google Web Toolkit (GWT), that I have contributed to the JavaScript TodoMVC project, which compares the implementation of the same application with various JavaScript frameworks. This blog discusses why I chose GWT, the compromises and benefits of...

8th
Mar 2012
·
1 min read

I have just published a new article on codeproject, which describes the creation of a Silverlight custom control for plotting the relationships between a network of nodes. Head over to codeproject and take a look! Visualisation of Eurozone Debt You can see the control in action below, where it is...

29th
Feb 2012
·
1 min read

Yesterday I presented a talk at the London-based Windows Phone User Group on the development of cross-platform mobile applications using PhoneGap. Here are my slides from the presentation: And here is the twitter search application I demoed: PhoneGapTwitterSearch.zip You can also try out Property Finder on your phone. Thanks to...

20th
Feb 2012
·
2 min read

UPDATE: I have posted the sourcecode for this control on codeproject. Recently I have been wondering about the wealth of information that can be gleaned from the 2.5 million programming question on Stack Overflow. A few weeks back I found a tag trending tool, which can be used to measure...

13th
Feb 2012
·
1 min read

Around one year ago I made the prediction that Silverlight would have an overall adoption of 81% by the end of 2011. The adoption statistics are now available and indicate that my predictions were wrong by more than 10%, with Silverlight adoption reaching just 67% at the start of this...

9th
Feb 2012
·
1 min read

In a couple of weeks I will be giving a talk on using PhoneGap for cross platform mobile application development at the WPUG #NotAtMWC12 event on Tuesday, February 28, in London. This post gives a brief overview of my talk and a video.

6th
Feb 2012
·
8 min read

This blog post provides step-by-step instructions for creating a user control, which exposes bindable properties, in WPF and Silverlight. The post covers dependency properties, and how to manage DataContext inheritance. When building user interfaces you will often find yourself repeating the same UI patterns across your application. After all, users...

19th
Jan 2012
·
3 min read

About a month ago I published an article which demonstrated how to create a WP7 application using static HTML pages and PhoneGap. Whilst PhoneGap makes the packaging of HTML / JavaScript / CSS and images into a breeze, one thing it doesn't do is provide correct back-button support. Correct back-button...

16th
Jan 2012
·
7 min read

The Windows Phone 7 camera gives you the option to record the location where a picture was taken (under Settings => applications => pictures+camera). With this feature turned on, each application has their latitude, longitude and altitude stored as part of the standard EXIF data. I thought it would be...

5th
Jan 2012
·
4 min read

I recently released an update of the HTML5 / PhoneGap application I wrote a few months ago to the marketplace. This update fixed the location detection issue, where the marketplace certification process failed to detect that the application was using geolocation data via the browser (this issue has been fixed...

22nd
Dec 2011
·
8 min read

Last night, with my Christmas presents all wrapped and a lack of any decent programmes (festive or otherwise) on television, I had a few hours to kill, so decided to create a festive-themed WP7 game ... Ever since I first started writing code for Windows Phone 7 I have wanted...

19th
Dec 2011
·
1 min read

Over the weekend I mentioned on Twitter that I had created a Metro-style PowerPoint template. There were a few requests to share, so hence this blog post. Scroll to the bottom to download the PowerPoint file. So why create a Metro-style PowerPoint presentation? A couple of reasons, firstly, the templates...

15th
Dec 2011
·
7 min read

This blog post shows how you can use PhoneGap to create Windows Phone 7 applications that are comprised of multiple, simple HTML pages, whilst meeting the Marketplace certification requirements. Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts....

8th
Dec 2011
·
4 min read

A popular user-interface in the iOS world is the UIPageControl which renders a small set of dots to indicate the number of pages, with the current page highlighted in some way. This is often used in conjunction with a UIScrollView to navigate between pages in a multi-page layout. Windows Phone...

28th
Nov 2011
·
5 min read

Recently I have been researching the use of PhoneGap for creating HTML5 Windows Phone 7 applications. I have written an introductory post on the subject and also managed to have a HTML5-based application accepted into the marketplace. The Windows Phone 7 execution model has a few unique features (when compared...

21st
Nov 2011
·
6 min read

This blog post provides a simple utility class that will cluster pushpins on a Bing Map control. This utility provides a way to achieve great performance with 1000s of pushpins. The Bing Map control for Windows Phone 7 is a versatile control, allowing you to provide your users with an...

17th
Nov 2011
·
4 min read

This blog post describes a simple helper class that can be used to supress scrolling and pinch zoom of the Windows Phone 7 WebBrowser control. Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts. Developers of Windows Phone...

14th
Nov 2011
·
3 min read

It has been another interesting week for HTML5 and front-end technologies. We have seen Adobe abandon work on mobile versions of the Flash plugin, news of Silverlight 5 being the last version of the Microsoft plugin and more recently an announcement that Adobe will no longer develop Flex, its enterprise...

10th
Nov 2011
·
6 min read

With the new Metro UI, Windows 8 has firmly embraced the tablet form-factor, with the interface tailored for touch and multi-touch interactions. Many of the Metro concepts familiar to Windows Phone 7 (WP7) developers are also present in Windows 8. Watching the vieos from the //build/ conference you can see...

7th
Nov 2011
·
4 min read

Last week I submitted Property Finder, a simple application that searches for properties based in the UK, to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. I was happy to receive confirmation that this application had been certified and published just two days later. You can download the application from the marketplace now....

24th
Oct 2011
·
10 min read

A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about how the recent announcement of PhoneGap support for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) which makes it possible to develop HTML5-based applications. In my previous blog post I showed the development of a simple HTML5 / JavaScript application which PhoneGap wraps up...

22nd
Oct 2011
·
1 min read

I have just received an email from Codeproject - my article on XAMLFinance, a cross platform Silverlight, WPF and WP7 application, has won Best C# and Best Overall article competitions for September. Having narrowly missed out in the monthly competitions a few times, I am pleased to have scored a...

21st
Oct 2011
·
7 min read

Having spent a number of years studying Physics at university, I have had the importance of error bars well and truly drummed into me! Within physics, or any experimental science, there are always going to be errors in the measurements you make. The more repeat measurements you make, the more...

19th
Oct 2011
·
7 min read

This blog post provides an implementation of IPagedCollectionView which allows paging of data from the server. An IPagedDataSource is introduced that allows any paged data source to be plugged in, with the standard controls such as DataPager making it easy to create paging applications. With web-based applications, bandwidth constraints often...

10th
Oct 2011
·
5 min read

This blog post looks at the new concept of 'transitions' that WinRT, within Windows 8, introduces. This concept makes it very easy for you to create a fluid and interactive UI without going anywhere near storyboards! I have to admit it, I am a big fan of the Metro Design...

6th
Oct 2011
·
4 min read

WInRT introduces a new interface for collection change notification, IObservableVector, which means ObservableCollection no longer works with this framework. In this blog post I will show how you can use ObservableCollection, via a simple adapter, within you WInRT applications. <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Path=MyCollection, Converter={StaticResource ObservableCollectionAdapter}}"/> Developers are slowly starting to get...

3rd
Oct 2011
·
6 min read

In this blog post I look at the new application lifecycle model that Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) introduces, and show how to handle the various lifecycle events in a simple MVVM application. In a previous blog post I described the development of a simple Windows Phone 7 application using the...

29th
Sep 2011
·
14 min read

This article show the step-by-step development of a Windows Phone 7 HTML5 application using PhoneGap. It also looks at how viable this approach is for cross-platform mobile development. Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts. Introduction...

22nd
Sep 2011
·
1 min read

I've just had an email land in my inbox from Microsoft's Mike Ormond, announcing that the Windows Phone 7 book that I contributed a couple of chapters to (Introduction and Tools), has finally been published! This is a collaborative book with contributions from Pete Vickers, Andy Gore, Mike Hole, Gergely...

19th
Sep 2011
·
1 min read

I have just published a new article on codeproject which describes the development of XAMLFinance, a cross-platform application for the desktop (WPF), web (Silverlight) and phone (WP7).
Head over to codeproject to read about the development of this application and download the sourcecode.
Regards, Colin E.

16th
Sep 2011
·
9 min read

With the Windows 8 preview release earlier this week, developers are now faced with a whole new and exciting Microsoft stack. The Windows 8 architecture has something of a split-personality, incorporating a completely new runtime, WinRT together with the older Win32 and .NET framework. However, these sit on different sides...

15th
Sep 2011
·
7 min read

In this blog post I take a look at Windows 8 on the outside, from a user perspective; and on the inside, from a developer perspective to see how it will change the way we develop with Windows on tablets, smartphones and the desktop when it is released next year....

11th
Sep 2011
·
3 min read

Just a few weeks ago I wrote a blogpost "Can Microsoft 'fix' JavaScript and make HTML5 applications viable?", where I described some of the issues with JavaScript and how these could be solved by Microsoft if they wrote a C# to JavaScript compiler. Just a couple of days ago it...

16th
Aug 2011
·
6 min read

Microsoft's recent change in stance over Silverlight, promoting HTML5 as "the only true cross-platform solution for everything", seems to have sidelined Silverlight as a niche framework. This has understandably caused a great deal of upset and confusion in the .NET development community. Despite this, Microsoft are remaining steadfast and tight-lipped...

9th
Aug 2011
·
1 min read

I am happy to have been invited by NEBytes to give a talk on cross-platform XAML applications later this month. The event kicks off at 6:30pm on August 17th at Room 120, Claremont Tower, Newcastle University, with the event including both my presentation and a talk on Office 365 by...

8th
Aug 2011
·
4 min read

This blog post describes how to implement a conversation / messaging style application with Windows Phone 7. It covers how to style the speech bubbles and the scrolling of the conversation list view when the phone keyboard is shown. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post which...

21st
Jul 2011
·
3 min read

The Windows Phone 7 Panorama control is widely used in applications and to many has come to symbolise the Metro Design Language. Search for panorama images and you will find numerous promo-shots of Windows Phone 7 applications which display the panoramic contents of the application hub, with an image of...

15th
Jul 2011
·
5 min read

This blog post looks at how to to create a conversation view, mimicking the SMS messaging interface within Windows Phone 7. This post shows how we can select different DataTemplate for each item in an ItemsControl to achieve this effect. The Windows Phone 7 SMS messaging interface graphically illustrates between...

1st
Jul 2011
·
1 min read

Earlier this week I presented a talk to the Silverlight UK User Group on cross-platform application development with WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. Thanks to Gergley Orosz for these pictures Thanks to all who attended my talk. Here is a copy of the presentation I gave: You can see...

1st
Jul 2011
·
1 min read

I have just published an article on codeproject which describes the differences in development between Silverlight and HTML5. In order to illustrate the differences, I have re-implemented my Windows Phone 7 JumpList control using HTML5/CSS3. You can see this control in action below: (NOTE: this will look best in a...

23rd
Jun 2011
·
1 min read

Readers of my blog will probably have noticed that I have a keen interest in both charting and performance. My friends over at Visiblox have combined these both to create what is one of the fastest charts for WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, see my recent benchmark blog post...

20th
Jun 2011
·
4 min read

When I started the Metro In Motion series, I thought I would probably post three or four articles and be done. However, every time I use my Windows Phone 7 I seem to spot a new 'native' fluid UI effect which I would like to use in my own code....

14th
Jun 2011
·
3 min read

This blog post details a simple metro-in-motion behaviour which reduces the Panorama control's contents while the user slides from item-to-item so that they can really appreciate your fancy background graphic! For those of you who have not been following my Metro-In-Motion series, I'll briefly recap. My aim is to provide...

6th
Jun 2011
·
5 min read

This blog post describes the development of a rolling list location indicator. This indicator mirrors the behaviour seen in the native Windows Phone 7 calendar which rolls from one date to the next as the user scrolls. For those of you who have not been following my Metro-In-Motion series, I'll...

23rd
May 2011
·
14 min read

This blog post shows how to implement tombstoning within a Windows Phone 7 application that following the Model-View-ViewModel pattern. UPDATE: I have published a update to this blog post to handle the new dormant state in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango). Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a...

16th
May 2011
·
4 min read

For the past few months I have been writing a Metro-In-Motion blog series which describes how to recreate some of the fluid effects found in native Windows Phone 7 applications within your own applications. So far I have covered fluid list animations, 'peel' animations, flying titles and a 'tilt' effect...

5th
May 2011
·
1 min read

When meeting current and prospective clients the subject of web technology choice often arises. There has been a great deal of confusion and uncertainty out there, even before Microsoft's perceived change of stance with respect to Silverlight emerged. This white paper is intended to help technology decision makers come to...

3rd
May 2011
·
6 min read

This blog post describes the implementation of a metro 'tilt' effect for Windows Phone 7 which causes element to respond to user interactions by tilting in 3D So far in the "Metro In Motion" series I have covered fluid list animations, 'peel' animations and flying title. In this blog post...

21st
Apr 2011
·
5 min read

This blog post describes a novel method of generating boiler-plate MVVM code using codesnippet automation. You simply add attributes to your view model classes and the code is generated for you! Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) has become the de facto pattern for Silverlight, WPF and WP7 applications, providing code that is easily...

18th
Apr 2011
·
6 min read

This blog post describes a Windows Phone 7 NavigationList control, a list control designed for navigation pages. The NavigationList renders twice as fast as a ListBox and has a slightly simpler API. A few months ago I blogged about the relative performance of the Windows Phone 7 emulator versus the...

14th
Apr 2011
·
1 min read

The annual MIX conference, where Microsoft showcases the latest and greatest technologies to the development community is now coming to an end. For many, the highpoints of the event are the keynote presentations, where Microsoft unveils their latest tools and technology. The keynotes are broadcast live across the internet and...

8th
Apr 2011
·
1 min read

Yesterday Gartner released its latest mobile smartphone sales predications, with the figures showing a dramatic turnaround in their predictions for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 platform. The latest predictions are charted below (I find this much easier to visualise this data in a chart versus the tabular form which Gartner...

4th
Apr 2011
·
8 min read

In this blog post I look at how to implement the fly-out fly-in effect seen in native Windows Phone 7 applications. This effect is seen in the native mail application; when you click on a message, the title flies out of the list then flies back in as the title...

27th
Mar 2011
·
6 min read

This blog post is part #2 of my Metro In Motion series. In this post I demonstrate how to implement the animated 'peel' effect seen when native Windows Phone 7 applications exit. In my previous blog post I discussed how the Metro Design Language that heavily influences the Windows Phone...

22nd
Mar 2011
·
5 min read

This blog post presents an attached behaviour that gracefully slides the contents of a list into view when used in conjunction with a Pivot control, emulating the Windows Phone 7 email application. The Windows Phone 7 user interface is based on the Metro Design Language, which favours clear typography, content...

14th
Mar 2011
·
4 min read

In this blog post I present a simple attached behaviour that uses a Thumb control within a Popup to adorn any UI element so that the user can re-size it. A simple feature that has become quite popular on the web is to attache a small handle to text areas...

10th
Mar 2011
·
1 min read

6th
Mar 2011
·
9 min read

This post describes a method of using attached properties to bind a ViewModel which contains multiple data series to a Visiblox chart without any code-behind. The Visiblox chart supports databinding in both WPF and Silverlight, where the X and Y values for each datapoint are bound to properties on an...

21st
Feb 2011
·
3 min read

This blog post shows just how easy it is to use Google Sky as a tile source for Bing Maps, bringing the universe to Windows Phone 7! Personally I think mapping is one of the most exciting forms of application for mobile devices - the fantastic imagery available from Bing...

11th
Feb 2011
·
2 min read

This blog post presents a few performance measurements that detail the relative performance of ItemsControl, ListBox and manual addition of elements to the UI. These performance measurements are also compared when ran on the emulator and the real hardware. My early experiences of moving from the WP7 emulator to the...

11th
Feb 2011
·
1 min read

At the weekend my wife was having a 'girls night out', which gave me an excellent excuse (and roughly four hours) to spend working on a DDDHack entry. I selected the RSSReader project as a starting point with the aim of turning it into something which resembled a more usable...

7th
Feb 2011
·
9 min read

This blog post describes how to re-template the Silverlight ProgressBar control to render a circular progress indicator. This approach uses an attached view model to circumnavigate some of the limitations of the ProgressBar design. This blog post describes the creation of the following funky styles for the ProgressBar (and a...

31st
Jan 2011
·
3 min read

Both WPF and Silverlight have a property TextTrimming="WordEllipsis", which trims the text that a TextBlock displays based on the available width. This blog post describes a simple method for automatically showing the full text as a tooltip whenever the text is trimmed. This is presented as an attached behaviour and...

28th
Jan 2011
·
3 min read

This blog post describes a simple content control that can be used to defer the rendering of its contents in order to provide a better user experience on Windows Phone 7. I think anyone who has made the transition from Emulator to Hardware with developing for Windows Phone 7 has...

26th
Jan 2011
·
8 min read

In this blog post I will describe the creation of a simple range selector UserControl, which can be used alongside a Visiblox chart to create an interactive navigator for time series data. Whether you are studying finance, politics, meteorology or sociology you are sure to encounter time series data. Time...

20th
Jan 2011
·
8 min read

This blog post presents a Windows Phone 7 Jump List control that I have developed.This post describes the API in detail and includes full sourcecode. Feel free to use and enjoy! The video below shows the control working on the emulator, the video further down this page shows it working...

10th
Jan 2011
·
1 min read

A few weeks ago I blogged about a Twitter / Bing Maps mashup that I had created for tracking snowfall in the UK via the #uksnow twitter hashtag. Last week I spotted a number of people in the uk who were using a new hashtag #ukfuel for tweeting fuel prices...

6th
Jan 2011
·
1 min read

A few weeks ago I created a Silverlight version of the #uksnow Twitter mashup, which plots twitter users snow reports on a UK map. Yesterday I spotted a new geographically encoded hashtag, #ukfuel. Twitter users are using this hashtag to share local fuel prices across the UK. The format of...

6th
Jan 2011
·
4 min read

Silverlight 4 added TextTrimming="WordEllipsis", which trims the text that a TextBlock displays based on the available width. This blog post describes a simple method for automatically showing the full text as a tooltip whenever the text is trimmed. This is presented as an attached behaviour. UPDATE: I have updated this...

24th
Dec 2010
·
4 min read

It's Christmas Eve and time for some fun! A few weeks back I published an article on Reactive Extensions where I created a Bing Maps / Twitter mashup that plotted the geolocation of #uksnow twitter tags. This twitter hashtag was popularised by Ben Marsh and is used by us weather...

21st
Dec 2010
·
6 min read

The WPF / Silverlight syntax is long and cumbersome. This blog post describe a simple attached property that allows you to specify row and column widths / heights as a simple comma separated list, e.g. RowDefinitions="Auto,,3*,,,,2*" The Grid is probably one of the most useful and versatile layouts that Silverlight...

20th
Dec 2010
·
2 min read

Around one week ago I published an article which compared the performance of Visibox charts to a few of its competitors. The results indicated that Visiblox was the fastest chart, with DynamicDataDisplay coming in a very close second. UPDATE: I have published a more up-to-date and extensive test of WPF...

10th
Dec 2010
·
10 min read

A few weeks ago I published a blog post which compared the performance of the Visiblox charts and the Silverlight Toolkit charts. The results indicated that the Visblox charts are considerably faster than the Toolkit charts, however Microsoft's David Anson did point out that the Toolkit charts were not designed...

6th
Dec 2010
·
1 min read

The announced launch of Silverlight 5 has got the developer community all excited about improved media capabilities, MVVM support, printing and 3D, but how will Silverlight adoption evolve throughout 2011. In this blog post I look at historic data and use this to predict a 76% adoption of Silverlight 5...

2nd
Dec 2010
·
1 min read

Just a quick update ...
I have published an article on codeproject "Exploring Reactive Extensions (Rx) through Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups" which includes the sourcecode for my uksnow mashup.
For the next few days, please let is snow ...
Regards, Colin E.

2nd
Dec 2010
·
1 min read

The following are a couple of examples to accompany my codeproject article on Reactive Extensions. You can read all about them, and download their source from the codeproject page. Twitter Instant A Google Instant style twitter search, type in some text to search Twitter: 'powered' by the following Rx pipeline:...

29th
Nov 2010
·
1 min read

UPDATE: I have published an article on codeproject "Exploring Reactive Extensions (Rx) through Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups", which has the full sourcecode for this mashup. A week ago a colleague of mine posted an interesting article on parallelism in .NET 4.0 which included a few different libraries for asynchronous...

22nd
Nov 2010
·
7 min read

In this blog post I look at how to add a new series type to the Visiblox charts by creating my own series type which renders a smoothed line using a Bézier curve. This blog post describes how to create a new series type for the Visiblox charts, a spline...

15th
Nov 2010
·
9 min read

In this blog post I look at how to use a Grid as the ItemsPanel for an ItemsControl, solving a few of the issues that crop up along the way. The Grid is probably the most useful of Silverlight and WPF's panels (panels are elements which provide a mechanism for...

8th
Nov 2010
·
10 min read

This blog post compares the performance of the Visiblox and Silverlight Toolkit charts using a simple image processing tool to test and illustrate their differences in performance. The results show that the Visiblox charts are approximately 50 - 100 times faster that the Silverlight Toolkit charts. UPDATE: I have published...

2nd
Nov 2010
·
6 min read

This blog post looks at the fallout after last week's PDC conference where Microsoft were quoted as saying "our strategy on Silverlight has shifted", and the resulting fallout in the developer community. In this post I will describe why I think Silverlight has a future ahead of it and exactly...

20th
Oct 2010
·
10 min read

In a previous blog post I described the process of creating a lookless gauge control. I introduced the concept of an attached view model which separates view specific concepts from the control. In this post I demonstrate how this allows for great flexibility when re-templating the control. In my previous...

13th
Oct 2010
·
7 min read

Recently I gave a presentation on cross platform application development with Silverlight, WPF and WP7. I wanted to move away from the standard PowerPoint bullet-point driven presentation style, so decided to create a presentation as a Silverlight application running in full-screen mode. This blog post describes the steps I took...

11th
Oct 2010
·
1 min read

Last week I gave a presentation at a joint Scott Logic / Microsoft event about how WPF and Silverlight are unifying the development platform for desktop, web and mobile. To accompany the talk I wrote a white paper which delves into this subject in a little more detail. You can...

24th
Sep 2010
·
1 min read

10th
Sep 2010
·
6 min read

This post compares the implementation of a simple ListBox layout with Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation. The use of Templates within WPF are a clear winner over the WinForms 'owner draw' route. Application user interfaces are becoming much more graphical, with users expecting a more engaging and 'lively' experience....

19th
Aug 2010
·
11 min read

This blog post describes the development of a lookless radial gauge control. In this post I will explore the use of an attached view model in order to move view specific properties and logic out of the control code in order to give a truly lookless control. Today I had...

12th
Aug 2010
·
8 min read

This blog post describes an update to the Silverlight 4 MultiBinding technique I blogged about a couple of months ago to add support for ElementName binding and TwoWay binding. A few months ago I posted an update to my MultiBinding solution for Silverlight 4. This technique allows you to perform...

21st
Jul 2010
·
6 min read

The Silverlight ScrollViewer exposes readonly properties which indicate the current vertical and horizontal scroll offset, and methods for setting the current offset. In this blog post I demonstrate a simple attached behaviour that exposes these offsets as read / write dependency properties allowing them to be bound to. The Silverlight...

9th
Jul 2010
·
5 min read

This post provides a simple IValueConverter implementation that makes use of the framework type converters in order to convert between a large range of source / target types. This converter can be used both within bindings and in code-behind to give more concise property setters. Introduction One of the great...

18th
Jun 2010
·
8 min read

This blog post looks at the problem of showing modal dialog windows in applications that target both the Silverlight and WPF platforms. A solution is provided which allows modal dialogs to be written that work well for both technologies. Silverlight is, roughly speaking, a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)....

14th
Jun 2010
·
8 min read

If your Silverlight application performs intensive updates to the UI during mouse events, the UI can freeze because it is invalidated before it has a chance to render. This post describes a technique for 'throttling' mouse events to ensure that each time an event occurs, the UI has the opportunity...

10th
May 2010
·
2 min read

In this post I describe an update to the Silverlight MultiBinding solution I presented last year. This update includes support for Silverlight 4, attached properties and multiple bindings on a single object. UPDATE: I have updated this code to include ElementName and TwoWay binding. Grab the latest copy here. MultiBinding...

30th
Apr 2010
·
4 min read

This blog post looks at a recently published set of charts in a UK newspaper and how they fail to help in the comprehension of the data which they visualise. I will also look at much more effective ways of displaying this same data. At Scott Logic we tend to...

26th
Mar 2010
·
5 min read

In this post I demonstrate a method for binding a Silverlight 3 DataGrid to dynamic data, i.e. data which does not have properties that are known at design time. This technique results in a bound grid which is sortable and editable. This blog post is a bug fix (due to...

4th
Mar 2010
·
9 min read

This blog post demonstrates a Linq API which can be used to query the WPF / Silverlight Visual Tree. You can find a few other Linq to Visual Tree techniques on other blogs, but what makes this one unique is that it retains, and allows queries that make use of...

19th
Feb 2010
·
4 min read

This blog post describes a simple technique for ensuring that consumers of events unsubscribe their event handlers without the need for weak events. I think the concept of managed memory, where the cleanup of unused objects from the heap is performed by a garbage collector, is a fantastic idea. It...

27th
Jan 2010
·
4 min read

Last week I gave a presentation on Agile Development for an event hosted by Codeworks and Sunderland Software City. This blog post is a brief review of my presentation and the event itself. The event was titled, "An Introduction to Agile Methodology - Get a Head Start in 2010", which...

7th
Jan 2010
·
5 min read

This blog post is about my entry to the Mix10k code competition, and old-skool demo, plus a few tips about how to keep you code size to below 10k. The mix10k challenge, where you are given 10k to create a Silverlight / HTML5 application, has been on my mind for...

16th
Dec 2009
·
4 min read

This blog post demonstrates how Silvelight 3's WriteableBitmap can be used to create a UserControl that renders the content of any other Framework Element as a reflection with an animated ripple effect.

2nd
Dec 2009
·
1 min read

Today, Philipp Sumi and I and are proud to announce the release of SLF - the Simple Logging Facade: SLF is a framework with a simple but ambitious mission: To provide every developer with the means to easily plug in logging functionality into her application.As such, it aims at two...

19th
Nov 2009
·
1 min read

This post looks at the speed of development of the two leading RIA frameworks, Silverlight and Flex, giving unequivocal proof that Silverlight is better than Flex ... ! This week at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC), there have been two big news stories. The first is the give-away of a...

26th
Sep 2009
·
3 min read

Today's blog post is a couple of very simple utility methods that I have found myself using again and again ... The animations that Silverlight developers have at their disposal are both varied and powerful. It is easy to get carried away and cover your application with gratuitous animations, which...

18th
Aug 2009
·
7 min read

UPDATE I have published a more up-to-date version of this code on codeproject, which allows you to automate the generation of much more than just dependency properties. This blog post describes a technique for specifying WPF / Silverlight Dependency Properties declaritively via attributes as illustrated by the following example: [DependencyPropertyDecl("Maximum",...

7th
Aug 2009
·
8 min read

The construction of a ViewModel is often seen as the standard technique for solving binding problems within WPF and Silverlight. However, the addition of a ViewModel adds complexity to your code. This post describes an alternative method where a mini-ViewModel is applied directly to the problem areas in the view,...

23rd
Jul 2009
·
2 min read

Yesterday myself and Gary Scott (our MD) went down to London for the Silverlight 3 UK launch event. This is the first time I have been to Microsoft's London office so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The glass-clad arched office exterior, and shiny minimalist interior were certainly stylish,...

14th
Jul 2009
·
1 min read

Text rendering has been a problem for both Silverlight and WPF for a while. This blog post looks at ClearType in Silverlight v3 and compares it to WPF and WinForms text rendering. Text clarity is something that concerns me quite a bit. In financial applications, often large quantities of both...

9th
Jul 2009
·
3 min read

A brief article on the launch of Silverlight 3 and why the interest in Silverlight is eclipsing that of WPF. The excitement behind Silverlight has been gaining in momentum throughout this year, with one of the highpoints being the MIX09 conference in March this year where the announcement of Silverlight...

25th
Jun 2009
·
6 min read

This blog posts describes a technique for associating multiple bindings with a single dependency property within Silverlight applications. WPF already has this functionality in the form of MultiBindings, the code in this post emulates this function. UPDATE: Silverlight 4, attached properties and multiple property bindings are all supported in my...

19th
Jun 2009
·
5 min read

I must admit that the title of this post is not entirely clear, however I couldn't find a way to sum up the content in one short sentence, so we'll dive straight into an example. Let's say for example you have developed a funky little business-card as illustrated above, using...

2nd
Jun 2009
·
4 min read

A few night ago I was working on a Siverlight control which renders some quite complex Paths, the geometry of which is determined from a number of dependency properties. In order to gain UI coolness points I wanted to animate the dependency properties in order to see a smooth transition...

12th
May 2009
·
4 min read

With Silverlight, Panels do not clip their contents by default. See the following example: Where we have a Grid containing another Grid which itself contains an ellipse, and a Canvas which contains an ellipse: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Grid Grid.Column="0" Background="Blue" Margin="20"> <Grid Background="Yellow" Margin="20,40,-20,20">...

1st
May 2009
·
1 min read

Last month was a busy one for me - I wrote quite a few blog posts, with the Silverlight ones proving very popular, and added new article posted to codeproject. I just received an email today notifying me that I was a prize winner in the Community Credit April 2009...

22nd
Apr 2009
·
6 min read

UPDATE: This blog post was written with a SL2 DataGrid, for SL3, please see my updated blog post. In my previous blog post I described a method for solving the commonly faced problem of binding a Silverlight DataGrid to dynamic data, the form of which is not know at compile...

17th
Apr 2009
·
7 min read

This post demonstrates a technique for binding a Silverlight DataGrid to dynamic data, the structure of which is not know at compile-time ... UPDATE #1: I have extended this technique to add include change notification so that the DataGrid can be made editable. Read all about it in part two....

1st
Apr 2009
·
8 min read

This blog details a technique for generating Silverlight dependency properties from an XML file via a T4 template. If you just want to grab the code, scroll to the bottom of this article and download the sourcecode or cut and paste the templates. If you want to find out how...

23rd
Mar 2009
·
4 min read

Silverlight is moving fast. Really fast. The recent MIX09 conference saw the release of Silverlight 3 (Beta) and also a new release of the Silverlight Toolkit. All this change is making it hard for us bloggers to keep up! Just over a month ago I posted an article on this...

19th
Mar 2009
·
2 min read

Less than 24 hours ago Microsoft's MIX09 conference kicked of in Las Vegas with Silverlight 3 taking centre stage. For those of you who have followed the conference build-up, this comes as no surprise, with twice as many Silverlight sessions (31) advertised than any other technology (WPF has a measly...

11th
Mar 2009
·
6 min read

When I first encountered WPF I was really impressed by its styling and templating features which are more powerful than anything else I had previously seen for desktop software development. The property-value pairing within styles instantly reminded me of CSS, however the WPF styles lack the most powerful feature of...

27th
Feb 2009
·
6 min read

In my previous post I demonstrated how an the WPF ElementName style binding can be emulated with Silverlight via an attached behaviour. As a brief recap, the technique involved creating an attached property, which when bound, adds a handler for the elements Loaded event. When the element is loaded, the...

22nd
Feb 2009
·
7 min read

As a relative newcomer to Silverlight I was happily greeted by the warm feeling of familiarity when I started developing. It is surprisingly easy to make the transition from WPF to Silverlight developer, with most of the core concepts being just the same. However, there are some parts of the...

10th
Feb 2009
·
4 min read

OK, the title of this blog post is not very snappy, but it is not an easy problem to describe in a few short words. Here's the rub, the WPF DataGrid has a select-all button located in the top-left corner, just like Excel and many other grid controls / applications....

4th
Feb 2009
·
6 min read

UPDATE - The March09 update of the Silverlight toolkit is incompatible with the code detailed below. For an up-to-date version see the following blog post. This blog post describes how to add a location crosshair to your Silverlight charts as shown below: The chart itself is rendered using the charting...

26th
Jan 2009
·
4 min read

Over the weekend Sacha published a new article on codeproject, Total View Validation (does Sacha ever sleep?). This article addresses some of the perceived problems with the WPF binding framework, firstly, that the standard solution of using the ValidatesOnDataErrors property forces you to place validation logic into your bound business...

21st
Jan 2009
·
3 min read

In my recent codeproject article on the DataGrid I described a number of techniques for handling the updates to DataTables which are bound to the grid. These examples all worked on the assumption that you want to keep your database synchronised with the DataGrid, with changes being committed on a...

19th
Dec 2008
·
1 min read

I have answered a few forum posts about the WPF transforms recently, mostly regarding confusion between RenderTransform and LayoutTransform. This brief blog post illustrates the difference between the two. The WPF layout system comprises, of two steps, followed by the rendering of the user interface (UI): Measure Arrange Render In...

4th
Dec 2008
·
1 min read

A couple of days ago I was happy to hear that I am a prizewinner in the Community Credit awards for November 2008. Community Credit encourages developers to contribute to the global developer community by writing articles, giving talks, participating on forums etc... Top contributors are rewarded with 'stupid prizes',...

2nd
Dec 2008
·
4 min read

The WPF DataGrid is a very flexible tool, however in its current state certain simple tasks can prove to be rather tricky. A fairly common task when working with DataGrid is detecting which row, or cell a user has clicked on, or whether they clicked a column header. You might...

28th
Nov 2008
·
5 min read

In a recent post on his blog Josh Smith described a technique for providing more meaningful error messages when the type conversion process fails within the binding framework. Consider the following problem; you bind an integer property of your object (Age for example) to a TextBox within your user interface....

27th
Nov 2008
·
1 min read

In my opinion the lack of decent design-time tool support is currently hampering the adoption of WPF, that and the relatively small number of controls available to the developer out-of-the-box. The later is being addressed to a certain extent by the developer community, notably by Marlon Grech's Avalon Controls Library...

26th
Nov 2008
·
2 min read

I am currently very interested in the new WPF DataGrid which was released on codeplex recently. Someone posted an interesting question in the codeplex forums asking about whether it would be possible to configure the DataGrid so that a user can make multiple row selections via checkboxes which are associated...

26th
Nov 2008
·
1 min read

Welcome to my blog, Colin Eberhardt's Adventures in WPF. This page gives a little background on myself and the blog. My name is Colin Eberhardt and I have been involved in software, in a number of shapes and forms, for more than a decade now. I have dabbled in a...